David Amerland's Blog: David Amerland on Writing - Posts Tagged "writing-process"

Those of you who follow this blog know two things about me: First, I use this as a form of therapy. It is the only blog I use as a monologue to myself where I externalize my thoughts on writing, writers and the writing process. Second, I haven’t written anything here since September last year. These two things are related.

It’s not that I haven’t been writing. I have. To the tune of approximately 2,000 words a day as I build up to my goal for this year of actually writing 5,000 words per day, every day until the end of December. At the same time I’ve been procrastinating. There are books that need to be written and I am not yet writing them and posts that really need to be added here and I am only now getting to them. And the reason is I’ve been afraid. Not deadly afraid for my life kind of fear, nor that special fear you get when you’re alone in a dark place and think you’ve heard a noise in the darkness you’ve never heard before.

Writers get a different kind of fear. It creeps up on us not because we fail but because we sense that we have begun to succeed. The moment we have an audience, the moment a book catches attention and the response begins to come back and it is mostly positive and mostly encouraging and mostly inspiring we freeze up. To us, the moment this happens, we are like a deer in the headlights.

I will try to explain it. Each book is a journey. Each journey is a piece of us. A writer doesn’t just put words in a book, that is an easy thing to do. He puts in ideas, and thoughts, discussions and hopes, dreams and expectations. It is a largely unconscious process that takes place as words go from inside the writer’s head into the vehicle that will capture them, freeze them and deliver them to be consumed by the reader.

This process works best when we are unaware of it: that’s when the ideas and the thoughts consume us and the dreams and the hopes drive us. Writing then takes place and hard as it is, it is also easier and feels truer. And then the attention comes. And suddenly the realization dawns that the journey is being shared by countless others who also bring their hopes and dreams, thoughts and ideas with them.

And that’s when the questioning begins: Am I up to it? Are my words good enough? Can I pull it off and write another book like that? Will I be sufficiently good, perceptive, smart, insightful to capture all those dreams and hopes readers have? Will my agent be impressed? Will my publisher love it? Will the reviewers say it’s amazing? And because the answer to all these questions is, invariably, “maybe” doubt seeps in and that’s the point where the writer starts to worry not about writing the book that needs to be written but whether his best work is behind him and he is now on a downward spiral.

Those of you who read The Sniper Mind know, of course, that all pressure is generated internally. We do this to ourselves. For me, who actually wrote it, the pressure becomes even greater because it suddenly provides a baseline to judge all my new efforts by. Did this sentence sound profound? Was this new insight sufficiently smart? Will this new idea resonate with everyone? Am I actually hitting the mark?

I am writing here again; so you know that I have an answer to all these questions. It is provided by the title of this particular blog post but it was a change in context that actually helped me see it. For me writing and breathing are synonymous and I don’t find either an easy thing to do (I will explain that last bit in another blog post, some other day). Suffice to say, for now, that I need to do both to actually feel alive.

Put like that the choices became obvious: life or death. And if life then everything else that comes with it is part of its process which is what it is. Death only comes when we get to the part of the journey that is clearly “not-life”. And by all this I mean that basically in my writing I am just doing my absolute very best, delivering each day without holding back. By focusing on that I don’t worry about how my writing is perceived or whether I am living up to some self-imposed standard to impress my readers or if my agent, publisher and reviewers think I am doing a wonderful job. I am driven by what I seek.

Truth is always liberating and writing should always be about truth. It is then at its most true.

For every writer comes a point where writing becomes an escape as opposed to a road of discovery. At that point two things have happened and they are both a trap. First, some level of technical accomplishment has taken place as far as writing is concerned. Crafting expressions has become easier. Choosing words is no longer quite the struggle it used to be. Second, writing has started to feel safe. The space where a writer burrows into in order to hide from the world.

Both of these spell “comfort zone” and for a writer they are a mental death. It’s like trying to live life from a rocking chair pulled up in front of a cozy fire. It may feel like life, but it’s not. Similarly, “comfort zone” writing is not writing. Sure, all the vital signs are there: words get created, pages get filled up, but nothing of note ever takes place.

I wouldn’t be writing any of this, of course, were I not all ready with a cure. Having experienced the allure and felt the pull, I have kinda smashed the figurative rocking chair to bits and put out the cozy fire. How? Why?

The last one first: writing is never easy and good writing is incredibly hard. It really feels like you’re pulling out teeth which is not far from the truth. A writer’s words uproot the truth from deep within the weeds and hold it up for everyone to see. Rooting for it is painful; full of false starts and stops and self doubt and the writing itself feels like your own lifeblood is just flowing out – it’s that draining.

Cozy was never designed to be part of the experience.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way here’s how I do it: I write 5,000 words a day. I write posts and articles and blog posts and drafts. The first 1,000 words or so come flowing out and they feel right and they are, every time I look at them later in the day, utter drivel. The kind of rubbish that sounds OK until you actually start to think about it.

That leaves me with about 4,000 words of meaning to arrange in a way that addresses our deep need for sensemaking. Just like these 500 plus words, this gets down later, when all I want is to stop. When the double-espressos course through my veins like wildfire and when my fingers threaten to dance across the keyboard faster than my mind can think. Late at night, when just staying awake is a struggle, the struggle makes everything real.

There’s no moral here. I found my ‘hairshirt’ and I am making it work for me. If you write for a living, like I do, you need to make sure your words are alive, their sound screeching across the consciousness of those who read them. Anything less than that and you do your craft a disservice and disrespect your readers. Worse still: you are officially dead; your writing (and your life) only pretend to be alive waiting for time to catch up.

The Sniper Mind: Eliminate Fear, Deal with Uncertainty, and Make Better Decisions

Let’s start with some complexity: writing is part of an unwritten contract binding writers whose job is self-explanatory with readers whose job needs to cross over into the writer’s domain in order for the writers they like to continue to write. Confused? Let me explain.

There is little point to my writing anything if there is no one to read it. Writers need readers. But readers don’t just appear like snowflakes falling from the sky. In order for someone to make the decision to give you their money and buy your book you need to connect with them at a level that makes the associated uncertainty and calculated risk negligible. This is bridged by trust which, in those cases where it is not formed as part of some kind of already established relationship, it is calculated through either extended contact or social proof.

Extended contact is certainly possible. As a writer I put out a lot of useful content that has practical value to readers which I publish on my blog. My reason for that goes beyond the purely transactional. I genuinely want to help others because I have been helped by the generosity of many in the trajectory of my own career so this is part of my giving back. In addition it provides a handy means through which readers and potential readers get to know me and when they engage either through comments or emails, I always take the time to interact.

Social proof is, really, nothing more than reviews. And here things get tricky. Most readers think that once they buy a book their job is done, after all, they have forked out money and given their trust so that should be it. Unfortunately it isn’t. Readers also have a responsibility to themselves, other potential readers and the writers they like (and even those they do not) to provide as honest a review as possible.

This makes it tricky because readers now have to write. Although sites like Amazon try to make the process as easy as possible, with reminders and channels through which a star rating system and a couple of words are enough to pass as a review, it still takes time and effort and thinking and all of this are obstacles that a busy reader with a life to live and a living to earn, barely sees as his remit.

So that leaves us at this impasse. Writers really need reviews from readers in order to increase the visibility of their books, establish a connection with their readers, better understand their audience, improve their own writing and continue to hone their craft. Readers think that writing is only what writers do.

Here are a couple of inescapable truths: Reviews are hard work and they put your name, as a reader, in the public domain, in writing. Reviews are a bridging point between writers and readers that shows exactly how successful the former has been at communicating with the latter.

If you read a book and write a review afterwards you will, usually, have to think a little about the book itself and its overall structure and message. That will help you, as a reader, but it will also help the writer. You will be giving something back from what you got.

The Sniper Mind: Eliminate Fear, Deal with Uncertainty, and Make Better Decisions

As usual, when I head into this space, it is an aside to some other activity I am engaged in. A particularly hard section in a book I am writing where I am stuck, an article that just doesn’t want to make sense no matter how hard I try to word it or an idea that’s swirling around my head looking for that opportune time to be born.

So, here I am, thinking but not thinking; or at least not overthinking which is not that weird because writing is something I do without thinking because I think so much about it when I am not writing. And the reason I am here now is because I am seizing the gap between more productive and profitable writing activity to actually put down one of the insights I had while writing about things other than writing.

And here it is: There is a very direct correlation between writing and marketing. We’re in a world where the transactional nature of every relational exchange hinges upon the strength and quality of the initial connection. Trust, empathy, humanity in other words is key here.

Businesses have a problem with that. Understandably so. How to square the fact that you are geared up to be completely transactional, balancing supply chain logistics and production costs against bottom line returns, with the need to now also take into account the volatile and fluid nature of a relationship that’s predicated on feelings, instead of need?

You see the problem?

Writers actually face the exact same issue. Let me explain. Writing and editing are two sides of the same coin. You cannot do just one. It will be incomplete. So one cannot exist without the other. Writing is, however, all about the writer. She will put in there what’s important to her. It is her vision, her thoughts, her ideas that materialize on the page, take concrete form and exist.

Editing is all about the reader. It respects, of course, the writer’s words and thoughts and vision, but it polishes them here, bends them there, slightly reshapes their direction until they fulfil the need of the reader. To write you need passion. But to edit you need empathy. Passion makes you selfish. Empathy takes you out of yourself and makes you feel humble.

It feels like a tag of war. But it isn’t. A writer reconciles the two by being in the service of the words. The words need to work equally for the writer and the reader. Otherwise all that passion, no matter how intense and fierce it may burn, will be wasted.

Similarly, marketing needs to convey whatever product, brand or service it markets; but that is not enough. To work it needs to resonate with its target audience. Marketing requires focus, passion, maybe selfishness. But in order to resonate it needs real empathy. If you do not feel your target audience you can never hope to write for them, or sell to them, anything that matters.

The Sniper Mind: Eliminate Fear, Deal with Uncertainty, and Make Better Decisions

I am writing this now instead of working on my treatment of a next book. So I am procrastinating. Or at least this how it would appear. But consider that I am actually writing instead of writing so this is not what’s going on here at all.

Which begs the question, right? Maybe you’re not entirely dying to understand what’s going on inside my head but seeing how I use myself as a petri dish, running metacognitive analyses on how I write, part of this perhaps helps you understand how to write better too.

So, what is going on?

I am working on something complex. As most non-fiction writing, I need to find a way to make it simple without losing the essence of its meaning or the cohesion of its ontological structure. And it’s frying my brain. I know I will get to it. I just need to find the right semantic pathways that will enable me to express it correctly so it makes sense.

While my brain’s whirring away at the problem I still need something to write and, well, here we are. I am now explaining this piece of writing which is to say that I am also showing you part of the writing process you don’t get to see.

This is what I find: if I engage in an activity that is associated with the problem I am trying to solve but not directly involved with it I can usually find insights that help me arrive at the solution I am looking for, faster. Plus, by focusing on the mechanical as opposed the cognitive aspect of the problem (i.e. in this case, the fact that the words I need to explain the concepts I want in a simple yet powerful way, escape me) I tend to understand the way my brain works a little better and that somehow helps me get to the solution of the problem I am dealing with, easier.

So. Stuck in your writing? It’s not “writer’s block” (that’s a myth!). You just need to give your brain a different perspective by engaging in something similar that it can actually do. It then works things out in the background and presents you with the solution you were looking for.

The Sniper Mind: Eliminate Fear, Deal with Uncertainty, and Make Better Decisions

So, this Friday ended on a high with Book Authority picking “The Sniper Mind” as one of the best new decision making audiobooks of this year.

Writers know that those of us who write for a living live in a state of perpetual fugue. Yesterday’s books vie for headspace with fresh ideas, new suggestions, exciting research that takes us down new rabbit holes, talks, meetings and new book outlines that need to sound coherent long before the ideas behind them have truly crystalized.

In addition there is all that other work that revolves around the marketing of previous books, talks, podcasts, interviews and presentations. Keeping it all together requires either more than one brain (I’d really like evolution to get a move on, on that) or the ability to compartmentalize things a little and add perspective.

I currently possess only one brain. So, in order to keep it together I employ the compartmentalization technique I just mentioned above. Namely I keep everything in my head in different compartments and I am careful about not letting them spill over. Case in point, today’s announcement by Book Authority. I am working on a couple of new projects at the moment and I am also busy finishing some market analysis for clients so the temptation to just drop everything and focus on this just now was pretty strong.

What I did, instead, was treated it as another piece of research/news to be analyzed, assessed and then placed in the normal stream of data that I have set up regarding The Sniper Mind. The result is that by the time I got to it so it can be processed I was in a more detached, analytical frame of mind and could then deal with it, without it derailing my day.

A little split-personality-ish; I know. Then again, it actually works for me. It might work for you too (if you’re writing, or multi-tasking).